Gate 41 Line 5: The Universalized Fantasy / The Seducer-Prophet
Line 5 — the 6th-level harmonic of Hexagram 41 (Decrease / Fantasy)
Line 5 in any gate is the position of the Heretic-Projectionist: the one who steps back from personal investment and projects the gate's theme outward, onto the screen of the universal field. In Gate 41 — the gate of fantasy, contraction, and the imaginative spark that initiates the desire-cycle — Line 5 has a single, unmistakable keynote: the fantasy is not one's own only, but is offered to — and imprinted upon — the collective. The line person carries the capacity to make their private dream contagious, to broadcast an inner image so vividly that others begin to live inside it.
The Line Within the Hexagram
Hexagram 41 is the image of decrease that paradoxically prepares the ground for increase (its inverse, 42). Its energy is contraction, sensitivity, the wellspring of longing, the seed of appetite. Line 5 stands at the upper edge of the lower trigram — the place from which the fantasy no longer hides in the unconscious but is aimed outward. Where Line 3 is the personal projection of fantasy and Line 6 is the distraction of fantasy, Line 5 is the universalization of fantasy: the moment the dream leaves the dreamer and becomes a shared atmosphere. The classical I Ching image — "someone increases him with ten pairs of tortoises" — speaks to the Line 5 person being increased by the very field they project into; the transmission is reciprocal.
The Gift: Universalized Vision
In its conscious, healthy expression, Gate 41 Line 5 is the **mythmaker, the seducer-into-possibility,